Tracking the original page 23

Some days ago the Page 23 concept was infecting the blogosphere on end, including this very journal. In short people all over the world were posting a set of instructions and a quote from a nearby book.

Inspired by a comment by J to my Page 23 meme, claiming the instructions had mutated somewhere along the way, I started clicking back through the history of Page 23, trying to trace the single, original page 23 post.

Unfortunatly, after nearly 20 blogs/journals/diaries my search ends in a loop. A few people insist they were inspired by each other, and the backtracking trail ends at a friends only LiveJournal.

So the most original instructions I have been able to dig up are from Cyn’s LiveJournal and are the exact same ones as I and everybody else have posted:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Yeah, somewhat a waste of time doing this, but kind of interesting trying to trace this, and I sure got to see a lot of different blogs that I’d never have seen otherwise.

The full path that I have been able to trace looks like this:

1. mentalized
2. Asterisk
3. peterme.com
4. Caterina.net
5. David Chess
6. Long Story; Short Pier
7. Notes from the Tundra
8. happy_potterer
9. And Though We Choose Between Reality and Madness
10. pegkerr
11. kijjohnson
12. mckitterick
13. bobhowe
14. Bilmo’s Log
15. the sentimental curmudgeon
16. tully monster’s fair and balanced fossil record (the path branches here for a short while)
    1. pbsage
    2. Merges into main path
17. Cyn
18. Hang the Dee Jay

The latter is a friends only journal, but according to a comment he got it from kricker (#16), and we start looping.

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